News

Bad Arolsen, December 4, 2018: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is now receiving direct access to the entire International Tracing Service (ITS) database—the world’s most extensive archive on victims of Nazi persecution. This project will make more knowledge about the names and fates of Auschwitz inmates available.

Irène Rossel headed a resistance group against the German Nazi occupiers in France. In 1943, the Gestapo arrested her and the writer and insurgent Jorge Semprún. After undergoing torture and imprisonment in several concentration camps, she died shortly after her liberation in Bergen-Belsen. The ITS still has in its...

The newly published booklet The Camp System introduces historical documents as sources of information on the Nazi camp system. It is based on documents from the ITS archive. With the aid of these sources, it sheds light on the dehumanizing practice of labelling and registering the inmates, forced labor, experiments on...

A circular of January 20, 1944 sent out by the Nazi party’s “Central Office of People’s Welfare” provides an inkling of the inconceivable suffering to which the National Socialists subjected women forced laborers and their children. The subject: the treatment of pregnant foreign women workers and their children.

At the EHRI workshop “Person-Related Records Beyond the Personal,” which took place at the ITS in Bad Arolsen on November 19 and 20, 2018, sixteen historians and archivists from eleven countries discussed the opportunities offered by—and limitations to–the evaluation of personal documents in research on the Holocaust.

Already within days of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, photographers of the U.S. Army Signal Corps began documenting the conditions there. A few months later, twenty-eight of the photographs they had taken between April 21 and 24, 1945 served as evidence (“Exhibit B-1”) in the Nuremberg Major War...

Who were the Jewish neighbours who fell victim to the pogroms in early November 1938? Who joined in the looting? Who stood by and watched? And how does my community deal with that historical event now?
Local history is important for understanding how National Socialism was able to spread in Germany. Today, in an age...

Bad Arolsen, November 8, 2018: The online archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS) continues to grow. With the 900,000 post-war records published today, more than two million documents are now available online. The portal is equipped with a name search function.

“No matter how good the safety precautions are, you can never entirely rule out an accident in an archive. So it’s all the more important that we do everything in our power to prepare for a possible emergency,” explains Christian Groh, the head of the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive. In order to be able to...

It was a strange heirloom that the cousins Martijn and Robert de Jongste of Holland received at the end of October 2018: a stained brown envelope addressed to the administration of the Ebrach Prison. It had been sent by the Staatliche Luitpold-Krankenhaus—that is, a hospital—in Würzburg. According to a note on the...